E is approximately 2.718, and today is 2/7/18, at least to Americans, so this is the biggest e day for a while. (NASA has the next 1,999,996 digits, should you need them.) Unlike π, e has not been contested in any state legislature that I know of.

I wonder what made those commenters think we have opposite views; surely it couldn’t just be that I suggest people consider the consequences of their words and actions. My working theory is that other markers have placed me on the opposite side of a cultural divide that they feel exists, and they are in the habit of demonizing the people they’ve put on this side of their imaginary divide with whatever moral outrage sounds irreproachable to them. It’s a rather common tool in the rhetorical toolset, because it’s easy to make the perceived good outweigh the perceived harm if you add fear to the equation.

Many groups have grown their numbers through this feedback loop: have a charismatic leader convince people there’s a big risk that group x will do y, therefore it seems worth the cost of being divisive with those who think that risk is not worth acting on, and that divisiveness cuts out those who think that risk is lower, which then increases the perceived risk, which lowers the cost of being increasingly divisive, and so on.

The above feedback loop works great when the divide cuts off a trust of the institutions of science, or glorifies a distrust of data. It breaks the feedback loop if you act on science’s best knowledge of the risk, which trends towards staying constant, rather than perceived risk, which can easily grow exponentially, especially when someone is stoking your fear and distrust.

If a group believes that there’s too much risk in trusting outsiders about where the real risk and harm are, then, well, of course I’ll get distrustful people afraid that my mathematical views on risk/benefit are in danger of creating a fascist state. The risk/benefit calculation demands it be so.

Iceland appears to be stuck in a state in which “no trees” is locally stable. So, the system pushes back when you try to reforest, at least until you can cross into another basin of attraction that’s forested.

Interestingly, in the Hirota et al. data above, a stable treeless state is a product of low precipitation. But Iceland is wet. So, deserts are a multidimensional thing.

The six on the left conform to a pattern or rule, and your task is to discover it. As an aid, the six boxes on the right do not conform to the same pattern. They might conform to a different pattern, or simply reflect the negation of the rule on the left. It’s possible that more than one rule discriminates between the sets, but the one that I have in mind is not strictly visual (that’s a hint).

Modeling barely appears here. Almost all the items concern the collection and analysis of data (no surprise there). Just imagine for a moment what it would be like if science consisted purely of observation, with no theorizing.

What are you doing with all those data points and the algorithms that sift through them? At some point, you have to understand whether the relationships that emerge from your data make any sense and answer relevant questions. For that, you need ways of thinking and talking about the structure of the phenomena you’re looking at and the problems you’re trying to solve.

I’d argue that one’s literacy in data science is greatly enhanced by knowledge of mathematical modeling and simulation. That could be system dynamics, control theory, physics, economics, discrete event simulation, agent based modeling, or something similar. The exact discipline probably doesn’t matter, so long as you learn to formalize operational thinking about a problem, and pick up some good habits (like balancing units) along the way.

Here’s what I think is happening. On windless days with powder, the snow dribbles off the edge of the roof (just above the center of the hump). Flakes drift down in a random walk. The railing terminates the walk after about four feet, by which time the distribution of flake positions has already reached the Normal you’d expect from the Central Limit Theorem.

Sears Roebuck & Co. was a big part of my extended family at one time. My wife’s grandfather started in the mail room and worked his way up to executive, through the introduction of computers and the firebombing in Caracas. Sadly, its demise appears imminent.

“The coming century, I think, will be dominated by major social, political turmoil. And it will result primarily because people are doing what they think they should do, but do not realize that what they’re doing are causing these problems. So, I think the hope for this coming century is to develop a sufficiently large percentage of the population that have true insight into the nature of the complex systems within which they live.”

I’m wandering through my archives, looking for interesting stuff to follow up on. I ran across A Titanic Feedback Reversal. The Backwards Brain Bicycle is a fun implementation of the problem that sank the Titanic:

NPR has a nice article on self-regulation in the textbook industry. It turns out that textbook prices are up almost 100% from 2002, yet student spending on texts is nearly flat. (See the article for concise data.)

Here’s part of the structure that explains the data:

Starting with a price increase, students have a lot of options: they can manage textbooks more intensively (e.g., sharing, brown), they can simply choose to use fewer (substitution, blue), they can adopt alternatives that emerge after a delay (red), and they can extend the life of a given text by being quick to sell them back, or an agent can do that on their behalf by creating a rental fleet (green).

All of these options help students to hold spending to a desired level, but they have the unintended effect of triggering a variant of the utility death spiral. As unit sales (purchasing) fall, the unit cost of producing textbooks rises, due to the high fixed costs of developing and publishing the materials. That drives up prices, promping further reductions in purchasing – a vicious cycle.

This isn’t quite the whole story – there’s more to the supply side to think about. If publishers are facing a margin squeeze from rising costs, are they offering fewer titles, for example? I leave that as an exercise.